Stephens Family Update

Hello Family!

I'm sorry that so many of you haven't heard from me for a while now. (Nana, thank you for the message!) Life in the Stephens family has been absolutely crazy! Let's start with Mike...

Mike has been deployed since December 11th, 2009. He is currently in the Logar Province of Afghanistan. Here is a picture of Mike with all of his Soldiers.

As you can see, he has a LOT of Soldiers that he takes good care of. This is not a picture of the whole company (that would be 200+ Soldiers), this is just his platoon. Most of his Soldiers are between 18 and 21 years old. Mike and I are considered "old people" in this company - it's funny. In case you can't pick him out - he's wearing sunglasses with his arms draped over a couple of Soldiers on the left.

Mike is a part of a Route Clearance Engineer Company. Their job is to patrol travel routes, look for IEDs and destroy them before they can hurt any of our Armed Forces Service Members. When they identify an IED, Mike has a special robot that he uses to help him approach and disable it. He carries C4 explosives with him to destroy the IED when a simple disable isn't possible. Mike is the only person in his platoon that is authorized to use the robot and explosives. His other Soldiers have different jobs, such as securing the area so that Mike can focus on disabling the IED.

It's a dangerous job. So far, despite their best efforts, Mike and his Soldiers have already driven over two IEDs. Sometimes it finds you before you find it. Fortunately, no one has been hurt so far. They have special vehicles with a V-shaped hull that deflects the blast away from the crew compartment. In the first two incidents, the crew compartments have remained intact - although the vehicles are completely destroyed. He sees a lot more action that what I just mentioned - but I'll spare our little ones the details.

Now for Hayden... Hayden has turned into a little boy from a little baby - overnight! Here are some pictures that I snapped yesterday.

Here he is after a bath. Since he doesn't have any socks on to get in his way, he is sucking on his toes!

Here he is playing in his room. He's starting to get tired, but he'll keep playing as long as I let him.

Here he is playing with his links - he loves them.

Here he is playing in his door jumper. It keeps him entertained when I need to work in our office. He doesn't do a lot of jumping yet, but he likes to walk in circles and play with the music toy on the front. At this point - he is crazy tired. You can see it all over his face.

Nap time! Hayden still has three different naps every day - anywhere from 30 min. to an hour or more. It just depends on how tired he is from rolling around the house.

That's Hayden's new thing - rolling, rolling, rolling. Hayden figured out how to roll-over back in November. He has completely mastered it now and uses rolling around as his mode of transportation. I suppose he is too impatient to wait until he learns how to crawl. He doesn't like to stay in the same place very long. I had to attend an emergency briefing at our battalion a couple of days ago (45 minute notice so Hayden had to come with me). One minute he's playing quietly next to me on the floor of the conference room, I look away for 30 seconds and he took off - rolling all the way across the room to say hello to our Brigade commander and his boots. If there was a speed-rolling competition for five month old babies, Hayden would win.

As for me, I'M EXHAUSTED. I provided my official FRG Leader resignation last week, but so far it hasn't made a difference. Our battalion staff and volunteers panicked. My former Co-Leader, Tiah, agreed to remain our company's sole FRG Leader if I would stay onboard as a senior advisor. Basically, I am trying to shift the entire work-load onto Tiah, but I'm still available for answering questions and providing guidance on how to handle and approach things. Unfortunately, I still receive daily phone calls and emails. I now approach everything from a teaching perspective instead of handling things for them. Hopefully it will work. I think it will probably take a couple of months to complete the transition though. I want so badly to give myself and Hayden more of my time. Creating this boundary is completely necessary at this point.

I have been losing my pregnancy weight consistently, slowly, but consistently. I haven't stepped on a scale since the day I gave birth to Hayden. I'm thinking about picking one up at the store today, now that I think I can handle what it will say. Even though I've been happy with my weight loss so far, I'm not too excited about all the wiggles and jiggles left behind. Okay Moms - I need to know the truth. Can exercise reverse the effects of pregnancy and gravity? Or, only partially? Be honest!

I think this post is getting too long now. I'll update everyone again in about a month!